A Response (by David Friedman)

to a Rebuttal (by Jonathan Andreas)

of a Critique (by David Friedman)

of an faq (by Mike
Huben)

When I wrote my
critique of Mike Huben's anti-libertarian
faq, it was my hope that Mike would write
a rebuttal. I could then write a re-rebuttal, and ... . My ultimate
objective was to use the web to produce a superior substitute for the
threaded arguments common on Usenet newsgroups.

So far as I know, Mike has not yet responded. But
Jonathan Andreas has. His response to my critique is available
here.
My re-response to many of his points is below. To make it a little
clearer who said what, I have color coded everything:

Mike's original
comments

My responses

Jonathan's rebuttals

My
re-rebuttals.

Jonathan starts by explaining that:

I have linked the section numbers
to MH's faq as DF did, but unfortunately DF did not put targets into
the HTML of his critique, so I can only include a generic link to the
top of his page.

You had only to ask; I have now
added anchors to my critique.

1. MH: [Libertarians] are
utopian because there has never yet been a libertarian society

DF: A utopia is an ideally perfect
society, not merely a society that has never existed.

DF appears offended that people
think libertarianism is utopian. However, if it is possible to
describe any group as utopian, then that word applies to many
libertarians.

It applies to many libertarians,
many liberals, many communists, many syndicalists, even some
conservatives. If Mike had written that some libertarians are utopian
the statement would have been true but uninteresting.

MH's point remains that
libertarians can not point to any example of a libertarian society
(outside of dubious romantic versions of some pre-industrial
societies like the tiny village society on Iceland).

It is useful, before criticizing
ideas, to know at least a little about them. Iceland wasn't a village
society--so far as we know, there was not a single village on the
island. And my analysis of its legal institutions first appeared, not
as "romantic versions," but as an article
published in a peer reviewed academic journal.

DF's version of libertarianism
(anarchy with property rights) is even farther removed from any
historical example than more moderate libertarianism. If no
libertarian society has ever evolved outside of fiction, then it is
surely a utopian movement that has not even succeeded at creating a
libertarian island or suburb or any community.

As I pointed out in my initial
response to Mike, "utopian" doesn't mean "unrealistic" it means
"ideally perfect." Consider the example I offered of modern mass
franchise democracy. Was that a "utopian" idea in 1700, when no such
society had ever existed?

...

2. MH: Are libertarians serving
their own class interest only?

DF: What class interest?
Libertarians are not a class in any economically relevant
sense.

MH could easily clarify the class
interest of libertarians in his faq. Define the economic class of
libertarians as being those above the median expected total lifetime
income. Certainly not all libertarians are well above the median
expected lifetimeincome, but all the ones I have met are. It might be
similar to say that about 90% of African Americans vote Democrat
because they have some class interest. Obviously not all Democrats
are African American and not all wealthy people are Libertarian. The
vast majority of wealthy people see the benefits they have received
from the economic system created in part by our government and feel
that they have some duty to pay some taxes. If the super-rich did not
feel the duty, they would have the resources to be able to dodge much
more tax than they do. Some wealthy people feel no such duty and
there are many examples of these elites (Marc Rich for one) who go to
great lengths to pay very little tax. As Leona Helmsey said,
according to her world view, "Only the little people pay
tax."

Your heroic efforts to defend Mike
even when his position is indefensible demonstrate courage--but not
sense. You have just asserted that his reference to libertarians
serving their class interest can be defended by:

A. Defining a class that includes
half the population and has none of the characteristics usually
associated with social classes.

B. Noting that you think a
considerable majority of libertarians are in that class.

C. Noting that you think the "vast
majority" of people in that class (actually, in a subclass to which
your arguments ought to apply even more strongly--"wealthy people")
don't perceive their interest as what you claim Mike claims is the
class interest that motivates libertarians.

In the process you have implied,
as Mike probably intended to imply, that libertarians are to be
identified with elites, super rich, the wealthy, etc. You have, in
other words, first defined your class broadly, so as to be able to
claim that most libertarians are in it, and then switched to a much
narrower (and more easily demonized) subgroup.

Most libertarians applaud and
encourage self-interest. Naturally, wealthy people who expect to pay
above the median lifetime taxes would find it in their short-term
self-interest to abolish them and find Libertarianism an attractive
ideology to justify dodging taxes.

Nonsense.

If, as you and Mike believe, taxes
produce benefits much larger than their costs, then people who expect
to pay above the median would still want to keep taxes. If, as I
believe, taxes produce benefits much smaller than their costs, then
even people who expect to pay below the median would want to abolish
them. And if, as most defenders of graduated taxes claim, people with
higher incomes get more benefit from government activity than people
with lower incomes, then even in a society where each tax dollar by
some odd coincidence produced exactly a dollar's worth of benefit the
people paying higher taxes wouldn't consistently support abolishing
them.

You, like Mike, are trying to
imply that libertarians are evil people who make dishonest arguments
for selfish reasons--but you are less ashamed of making that claim
than he is and so make it more explicitly.

So far as dodging taxes, that is a
profitable activity for those who can get away with it whether or not
they are above the median.

3. DF: Mike seems to forget in
this passage that he himself is, by his definition, an
evangelist.

Perhaps MH should expand his
definition of Evangelist from "(those trying to persuade others to
adopt their beliefs)" to *only* include people who as he later states
"tend to be more interested in effect than in accuracy." Then DF's
critique of this point would loose nearly all its weight.

As would Mike's original argument.

You are confusing your beliefs
about other people's arguments with theirs. If I evaluate your
arguments by whether I think they are accurate, you fit your
definition of an evangelist, since most of them aren't. But I have no
doubt that you think they are accurate. Similarly, I expect that even
libertarians who you and Mike think are making bad arguments--even
libertarians who I think are making bad arguments--for the most part
believe that they are making good arguments, hence do not fit your
definition of evangelists.

As you would know if you were more
familiar with libertarianism, a small number of libertarians have for
years been trying to persuade other libertarians to select those
(correct) arguments that will persuade other people in preference to
those that will offend them--with very limited success.

5. MH is correct that the
Government is the foremost defender of our freedoms and rights. DF
also correctly points out that it is also a foremost infringer of
rights. Does Government create and defend more freedoms than it
destroys? It is hard to tell.

Hence MH's argument, which implies
that it is easy to tell, is wrong.

Part of the problem is defining
what rights are. Rights are social constructs.

If you think that is all they are,
let me suggest two things worth thinking about.

A. If a society decides that
torturing dissenters to death is legal, do they have a right to do
so?

DF has a good point that
governments kill a lot of people, but it is unfortunate that DF does
not give any data to back up his claim that governments kill more
citizens than private murders.

Why should I do all the
work?

You can find the data on
government killing in the 20th century in Rudolf J. Rummel,
Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900. I
don't have a similarly complete source for private murder, but one
can make at least rough estimates.

The U.S. murder rate peaked at
about 10/100,000/year, generally regarded as a very high level by
both historical and international comparisons. Assume the world
average over the 20th century to be a tenth of that. Assume the
population of the world averaged three billion people over the 20th
century. That gives you an estimate of three million private murders
over the century--roughly one fiftieth of Rummel's estimate for
government murders. A factor of fifty allows lots of room for varying
the detailed assumptions.

Do democracies kill more citizens
than private murders? Probably not. It is important to distinguish
between the government of authoritarian communist China and that of
peaceful democratic Costa Rica. ...

Germany was a democracy for most
of the fifty years preceding Hitler's takeover. Indeed, Germany under
Bismark was widely regarded by progressives as a model to be
imitated, and a number of important institutions in modern societies
are modeled on it. Cambodia was a reasonably peaceful (although not
democratic) society prior to the events that led to the Khmer Rouge
killings. You can't judge whether governments, on net, do more good
than damage, or violate more rights than they protect, by only
looking at the good governments in the good years.

...

DF is disingenuous to compare the
crime rates of England in the 1700 to that of today and say that it
worked better then because of private law enforcement.

I might have been disingenuous to
have said that, but I didn't. What I actually wrote was:

"There is also some evidence that
the murder rate in 18th century England, where most of what we think
of as law enforcement (catching and convicting criminals) was
private, was not radically different from the rate a century later,
under modern institutions."

I count three false statements
explicit or implicit in Jonathan's one sentence summary of
that.

"not radically different" is not
equivalent to "worked better"

"a century later (than the) 18th
century"=19th century not "today"

"There is also some evidence that
X" is a much weaker claim than "say that X."

Jonathan seems to have difficulty
with such fine
distinctions.

and institutions that worked in
hyper-religious pre-industrial village society probably would not
work in today's gun infested urbanized society.

England gots its first police
force (in anything close to the modern sense) in the 1830's. During
the preceding century it was not hyper-religious--that was the
century when Hume, arguably an atheist, could defend established
religion on the grounds that it "bribed the indolence of the clergy."
The right to bear arms was well established in English law by the end
of the seventeenth century.

DF also gives the example of Saga
period Iceland (going back 1000 years or more) as a model for
government and law enforcement today. This is ludicrous.

It might have been if I had, but I
didn't. Mike's claim, which I was answering, was that "The foremost
defenders of our freedoms and rights, which libertarians prefer you
overlook, are our governments." My response was that:

This is presented as if it is a
fact when it is actually an interpretation, and a highly contestable
one at that.

Mike's interpretation of the
evidence implicitly assumed that rights could not be protected save
by government. I was providing a counterexample--one example of a
society without either government law enforcement or horrendously
high crime rates.

If you want my model for today,
you will find it in part III of The Machinery of Freedom. That
was written before I knew anything about Icelandic legal
institutions. But you might describe it as an updated version of
those institutions, just as you might describe a modern market
economy as an updated version of a village market.

There are more recent (and close
to home) examples of societies in the history of the American West
that had no government expenditure on law enforcement, with high
levels of rights and property rights protection. However, the
vigilante justice of the period did not follow due process and was
extremely harsh (immediate death upon apprehension for alleged
theft). Few people would trade our expensive modern criminal justice
system for the fiscally cheap vigilante justice systems of the
pre-government American west.

6. DF would have us believe that
public defenders, the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are "almost
entirely government efforts to protect rights and freedoms from
infringement by the government." It is hard to imagine that DF or any
reasonable person believes that government is "almost entirely" the
only thing that infringes upon our rights.

It is hard to imagine that you, or
any reasonable person, could read what I wrote so carelessly. "public
defenders, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights" are not the only
things that could protect rights. Hence observing that those things
exist mainly to protect against infringement by the government does
not imply, or even suggest, that only government can infringe
rights.

How does DF measure the percentage
that these legal institutions defend against the government and how
much they defend against private parties? Only a very small
percentage of legal cases claim the government as defendant.

But all criminal cases claim the
government as plaintiff--that is part of the definition of a criminal
case. Public defenders are attorneys provided by the government to
defend people who are accused of crimes and can't afford a lawyer.
Hence they exist entirely to defend people against prosecution by the
government.

It is also obvious to anyone that
this list of government institutions defends against all
infringements by anyone including the government, so this point of DF
does not refute anything in MH's faq.

The Bill of Rights consists
primarily of descriptions of things that Congress may not do. Public
defenders exist entirely to defend criminal defendants against
government prosecutors. It's true that the the Constitution exists in
part to prevent rights violations by foreign governments, but mostly
it sets up and constrains the structure of the federal
government.

Insofar as government, under the
original Constitutional scheme, was involved in protecting rights
against non-governmental infringement, that was the job of state and
local governments--which were not established by the Constitution or
the Bill of Rights.

8. DF goes to the heights of
absurdity to claim that libertarians achieved the "abolition of
slavery, the institution of large scale free trade, the destruction
of guild restrictions on employment--most of the progress of the 19th
century". Statists (assuming that there is someone who is willing to
go by that libertarian umbrella label) could more easily assert the
same claim for themselves. VERY few of the many people who worked to
end slavery (such as Abraham Lincoln) were anywhere near the
political stripe of DF and all of these examples of progress were the
direct result of government action rather than some kind of market or
libertarian force. DF might as well also claim that the spread of
democracy, extension of life span, eradication of smallpox, and the
huge improvement in the standard of living of the past century are
also "progress" and are therefore libertarian accomplishments.

What I wrote was that

"libertarianism, in its earlier
and somewhat more moderate incarnation as classical liberalism, has a
historical track record ..."

Are you denying that the changes I
described were the work of classical liberals? Are you denying that
classical liberalism was an earlier and more moderate version of
libertarianism?

It's true that the abolition of
the slave trade depended on government power (the British
navy)--motivated in part by classical liberal arguments. But my other
two examples--the shift to free trade and the destruction of guild
restrictions on employment--were both cases of a government that had
been doing things (taxing imports, enforcing guild monopolies)
ceasing to do them. I am puzzled as to how you can describe that as
"the direct result of government action." If the U.S. government were
to end the war on drugs, would you describe that too as government
action?

Have you ever heard of the Corn
Laws? The anti-Corn Law League? Cobden? Bright?

I have, however, changed "the
abolition of slavery" to "the abolition of the slave trade" in my
reply to Huben, since that is what I was actually referring
to.

9. DF suggests "that we reduce
government expenditure to the level that can be supported by taxing
[income from unproduced resources]." which he claims are only
a few percent of national income.

...

It is easy to save a few percent
of the national budget by cutting popular libertarian enemies like
NPR funding, but the big expenses are often things that most
libertarians would secretly like to keep such as defense.

As it happens, I would be happy to
drastically cut defense spending. But in any case, as you can easily
check from the Statistical Abstract, defense spending is only a
little over ten percent of total government spending (state, local,
and federal combined). Education is about fifteen percent. Public
welfare expenditure (not including social security) is roughly
comparable to defense expenditure.

Ironically, DF says he would
accept (as a compromise) a tax on unproduced resources like land.
Until now he has been arguing that taxation equals theft and that the
government does not have the right to tax.

More precisely, I have been
rebutting Mike's arguments against people who make that
argument.

Now he is willing to accept
billions of dollars of property tax. What happened to the righteous
indignation against government and taxation? If DF really believes
taxation is the moral equivalent of violent theft via men with guns,
then no amount would be OK. How is it possible for a libertarian to
morally justify accepting this theft but not others?

I haven't morally justified any
taxation at all. I merely proposed to Mike a compromise between what
he thought was justified and what I thought was justified. In case it
wasn't obvious, the point of the proposal was that if we limited
government to what the argument he had just made justified, we would
have to eliminate most of it--a "compromise" biased heavily in my
direction.

It is also ironic that DF chooses
to live in a city and a state with relatively high property tax,
sales tax, income tax and extensive local government services and
regulations. If he were really convinced that taxation is the moral
equivalent of violent theft via men with guns, then why doesn't he
take some very simple precautionary steps to avoid it and move to a
city and state with less taxes and regulation? Most people go to
great lengths to avoid violent crime. Perhaps he doesn't really
believe his own analogy.

You could choose to live in a
country with a lower murder rate. Does it follow that you don't
really believe that murder is immoral?

10. DF is correct that the origin
of the "social contract" is problematic. However, it is a convenient
construct to explain and give moral justification for how society has
evolved even if it is just a metaphor. However, it is no more
problematic than property rights or laws. Laws are also problematic
without some kind of social contract. Why should I obey any laws? I
did not sign any social contract.

Do you believe that there is
nothing wrong with murdering people--assuming you have not previously
promised not to? I didn't think so.

More generally, the argument you
are offering is internally inconsistent. In order for a social
contract to be morally binding, you need to assume that before
signing it we alreadly have a moral obligation to keep our contracts.
Why are you willing to assume that pre-existing moral obligation but
not the moral obligation not to murder people?

11. 12. 13. Again, a social
contract is an arbitrary social construct, but the same thing is true
of property rights or laws.

All laws? You believe that laws
against rape and murder are merely "arbitrary social constructs?" If
so, then if the law were the other way murdering and raping people
would be just fine. Is that your view?

Libertarians just get more fixated
on the taxation clause in the social contract than the property
rights clause. If the government creates the infrastructure that
underpins our economy such as money, the legal system and property
rights, does it not have property rights over the use of that
infrastructure? Why can't it then tax the use of these things as it
sees fit?

I have no objection to the
government taxing the use of government money--providing that it lets
us use other money if we prefer. I don't even object to the
government charging fees for using its courts--as long as it leaves
us free to use other courts if we prefer.

If you copy CDs and freely
distribute them at your own expense to the poor (who probably would
not buy them anyway) MEN WITH GUNS will initiate force and put you in
jail. Why do libertarians get more excited about tax law than
copyright or other laws?

That depends on the particular
libertarian; some of them don't like intellectual property laws
either.

Why is it that, when your argument
is about "other laws," you conveniently choose intellectual property
laws for your example--a category of law that many people do not find
morally persuasive. You could have made your argument just as well by
starting out "if you go around murdering men, raping women, and
torturing children to death, MEN WITH GUNS will ... ." Why didn't
you? You might want to think about the question, in order to decide
whether you really believe the arguments you are making.

14. MH: Some libertarians make a
big deal about needing to actually sign a contract. Take them to a
restaurant and see if they think it ethical to walk out without
paying because they didn't sign
anything.

DF: The act by which one agrees to
an implicit contract is an act that the other party has the right to
control

DF's
assertion makes no sense. In any contract, both parties must agree.
Thus with an implicit contract, DF is arguing that both parties must
have the right to control the act. In the case of the restaurant, who
has the right to control whether food is exchanged for
money?

Both parties have the right to
veto the act, neither has the right to insist on it--as with any
other voluntary transaction. If you don't want to sell to me, you
don't; if I don't want to buy from you, I don't. Why do you find that
puzzling? It is the basic rule by which we conduct a large part of
our lives.

Consider a different voluntary
transaction--marriage. Do you have any problem understanding in what
sense both parties have a right to control the act?

One has the right to control
whether they stay in a country or not.

I have the right to control
whether I stay in a country or not--hence I have the right to say to
the government (or anyone else) "I will only stay in the country if
you meet the following conditions"--and then emigrate if my
conditions are not met. But Mike's argument requires that the
government have the right to decide whether I stay in the country or
not.

Note that I wrote "an act that the
other party has the right to control." If my act is staying in
the country, the "other party" is the government, not me.

15.
[some legitimate points by
Jonathan about problems with the origin of property rights
omitted--the response would have to be way too long for this
context].

The important question for
libertarians to answer is how do they provide a rule of law without
government or government territory? Without some sort of territorial
rights, there is no way to have laws. Does DF want to create a
society of men with guns in which everyone must enforce their own
individual contracts with guns?

For a brief hint ... . Do you
believe in government run agriculture? If, as I assume, the answer is
no, does that mean that you want to create a society where everyone
has to grow his own food?

So far as the claim that without
"territorial rights" there is no way to have law, that's absurd. The
Law Merchant arose without territorial rights, as did the law of the
sea. There are lots of historical examples of societies where what
law applies to a dispute is determined, at least in part, by
something other than what territory the dispute occured in--including
ours.

There are also many examples of
government rights evolving without conquest. For example, the powers
of the federal government of the US, and the EU evolved in large part
without conquest. The transferal of power from the British monarchy
to their democratic government of today also evolved largely without
conquest.

Those are both cases where one
government transferred rights to another, not where individuals gave
rights to a government. And in any case, the big shift of power to
the U.S. federal government was the result of a long and bloody war,
as was the big shift of power from the English monarchy to
parliament.

16.
...

When democratic governments take
away taxes, they do not privately consume them like criminals would
(increasing criminal consumption is not necessarily a bad thing, but
most people are morally opposed to it). They primarily redistribute
the resources to other individuals and produce (mostly) public goods
for the benefit of all citizens. By equating criminal theft and
taxes, DF is wrongly assuming that criminals have an incentive to be
benevolent like Robin Hood and steal for the benefit of the public.

You have it backwards. It isn't
that I assume criminals are benevolent but that I don't assume
governments are.

Your claim that governments
redistribute is true--but so do criminals. One common outcome on the
political market is that interest groups use government force to
redistribute to themselves--just as criminals use private force to
redistribute to themselves.

Your second claim is that
governments produce mostly public goods for the benefit of all
citizens. You asked me to provide support for the claim that
governments in the past century killed more people than private
individuals--a statement that is true with a safety margin of well
over an order of magnitude. Would you like to provide support for
your confident claim about what government produces and who benefits?

I would have said that many goods
governments produce are private goods and that, with the possible
exception of national defense, most government activity does not
benefit all citizens, or even most citizens. Governments quite
routinely do things--the farm program and all tariffs come
immediately to mind--that injure most citizens. They do them in order
to buy the political support of particular interest
groups.

17. MH: (1) If taxes are
eliminated, you'll need to purchase services that were formerly
provided by government. (2) If taxes are eliminated, the economics of
wages have changed, and wages will change as well.

DF's
response to MH's point (1) is that, "most of the services provided by
government cost far more than they would if provided privately".
However, the private sector will not provide most government services
at all. Most government services are public goods and it is very
difficult for the private sector to make a profit from providing
public goods.

Both halves of the statement are
false. Schooling is the largest single expenditure of U.S.
governments--and it is a private good in the ordinary sense of the
word. The private sector quite routinely makes a profit providing
public goods--consider radio and television broadcasts, which unlike
schooling really are pure public goods.

Many economists argue that when
the economy (government or market) does not provide enough public
goods, the efficiency of the economy declines and everyone is
poorer.

If public goods are produced at
suboptimal quantity or quality, people are on net poorer than they
would be if public goods were produced in optimal quantity and
quality, all else being equal. But to get from that to "therefore
government should produce all goods that the market underproduces"
you need at least one further step--an argument to show that the
political marketplace will actually yield production at optimal
quantity and quality. No such argument exists.

DF also gives three examples of
arguably bad regulation to demonstratehow bad government is.
Unfortunately, whenever there are laws created by humans, some of it
will be bad regulation. A libertarian government will not change
that. American citizens will always have to be vigilant to put
pressure on lawmakers to change laws regardless of how big or small
the government is.

1. My libertarian society
will change that, because it won't have a government to make bad
regulations. I agree that a libertarian minarchy will have to worry
about bad laws for the same reason our current system does. That's
one of the reasons I am an anarchist.

2. Perhaps we should also solve
our energy problems by being vigilant to make sure water runs uphill,
thus allowing us to power our cities from generators located on
circular rivers.

Or in other words, I am offering a
theory of what government will do, you are offering pious hopes
inconsistent with what we know of human behavior.

18. 19. DF is correct that the
government was a smaller share of the economy in the 19th century.
However, most Americans demand more expensive service from their
government today and it is no surprise. People are several times
wealthier now and our demand and consumption of all goods (including
those produced by government) has also increased several times.

What you just agreed to is that
the government share of the economy increased. If government
spending merely increased in proportion to private spending, the
government share would remain constant.

Many of the services that
government provided in the 19th century, such as defense, education,
and public health, have become much more expensive relative to other
sectors of the economy such as manufactured goods and commodities
which are generally cheaper now (in real terms) than in the 19th
century.

Why is it that government
activities become selectively more expensive to produce--by a factor
of nearly four, if your argument is to explain the growth in
government? How come none of these services exhibit economies of
scale? Wouldn't you think that, as they became relatively more
expensive, we would substitute away from them? Don't you detect a
faint whiff of special pleading?

20. MH: "Self government" is
libertarian newspeak for "everybody ought to be able to live as if
they are the only human in the universe, if only they believe in the
power of libertarianism."

DF: You don't need the power of
libertarianism--standard neoclassical economics gets you most of it.
To first approximation, the price system allows each individual to
use his resources to achieve his objectives without imposing net
costs on others--for details see the chapter on " What is Efficient"
in my (online) Price Theory.

DF has a lot of great ideas for
economics, but in this case, DF's economics is not so much "standard
neoclassical economics" as it is neo-economics. Neoclassical
economics does not lead to libertarianism in the eyes of the vast
majority of economists. This is obvious because the vast majority of
economists are not libertarians.

The vast majority of American
economists are more libertarian on a wide range of issues than
American academics in general, as was revealed by a couple of
AER articles based on polls a good many years back. I agree,
however, that very few American economists are as libertarian as I
am.

But if you actually read what I
said, instead of inventing claims to refute, you might notice that I
didn't say or imply that most economists were libertarians. I merely
said that standard neoclassical economics solved one of the problems
that Mike raised with libertarianism--the problem of how individuals
can live "as if they are the only human in the universe" when they
are actually part of a complicated interdependent society. Explaining
how it does so requires more than a paragraph or two, which is why I
pointed the reader to a chapter in a webbed book.

I checked DF's link to his
textbook chapter on efficiency and found it conveniently omits
several preconditions to efficiency which other, less ideological,
textbooks do not. Not everyone are price takers, there are
transaction costs, and there are externalities. ...

"Throughout the argument, I
have assumed that everyone concerned--firms, owners of the factors of
production, and consumers--is a price taker. If even a single
participant in the market is not, then somewhere in the chain of
argument a link fails and we can no longer prove efficiency.
" (Price Theory,
Chapter 16)

If you are going to make
statements about books, even chapters, it is useful to first read
them.

Another major flaw with using
economic efficiency as a moral yardstick is that it says nothing
about justice. ...

If you are criticizing my response
to Mike Huben, this is irrelevant--the passage you are responding to
says nothing at all about using economic efficiency as a moral
yardstick. If you are criticizing my book, you ought first to read
it; the issues you are raising here are discussed in
Chapter 15.

25. DF: A large fraction of the
arguments for government regulation of individual action depend on
the implicit assumption that individuals act on their own
self-interest under conditions of limited information in market
contexts, but that government actors are fully informed and
benevolent--with no theory to derive the latter from the
former.

There is no more need to assume
that government is fully informed and benevolent to derive the
benefits of government than there is need to assume that individuals
are fully informed and benevolent to derive the benefits of markets.
A very simple theory from late economist Mancur Olson to derive the
beneficial impact of government is as follows.

(omitted argument demonstrates
that governments will be less destructive than roving bandit gangs,
since they have more secure property rights, which is
correct.).

Later some nations evolved into
democracies. These can be seen, in the least charitable light, as
dictatorships of the majority which try to rob the minority. However,
the majority (working in self-interest with limited information) will
now decide to provide even more public goods in order to increase the
income of the majority. ...

You will find a fairly detailed
explanation of some of the reasons why this doesn't work in
Chapter
19 of Price Theory. I
expect Olson would agree with most of it, but unfortunately we can no
longer ask him.

Furthermore, the roughly 190
national governments of our world compete with each other for
productive citizens and for military and economic power. This
competition provides some check on the excesses of governments.
Factions within countries also compete for power. Generally, the more
broadly distributed the power is in a country, the better the
government will be at providing public goods as if it were purely
benevolent.

Chapter
19 provides a rather more
detailed analysis, mostly borrowed from Becker, of the result of
factions within countries competing for power. I certainly don't deny
that there are some checks on the excesses of government--if there
weren't we would be a lot nearer starvation than we are. But you are
jumping from the claim that government isn't infinitely evil, which
is true, to the conclusion that government will predictably tend to
exercise its power in a fashion that on net increases economic
efficiency. And the comparision here is not "government versus bandit
gangs" but "government vs laissez-faire"--otherwise you (and Mike)
would be arguing for libertarian minarchy, and you aren't.

...The incentive for the ruler of
the government is self-interest to maximize long term revenue by
maximizing economic growth.

That might work for an immortal
absolute ruler, assuming he was competent, but that isn't the system
we are describing. In our system, political actors have insecure
property rights in their political power, leading to precisely the
problem you earlier described in the context of bandits. And there
isn't "a ruler," resulting in some of the other problems that I
describe in chapter 19.

Besides, even if the rest of your
argument were true, you are confusing maximizing tax revenue with
maximizing human welfare. Suppose there is some public good which
benefits people not by increasing their future output but by
increasing their present happiness. Happiness isn't taxable, so why
should your hypothetical ruler bother to spend a penny producing it?
Wouldn't his optimal policy be to impose the revenue maximizing tax
rate on it?

27. DF: There are real examples of
more or less libertarian societies, and of societies that in
particular respects were entirely libertarian, so we do have real
world evidence to go on.

Even if you accept DF's nostalgic
version of history, DF doesn't give any "real world" examples that
are more recent than the 19th century.

Hong Kong is quite a bit more
recent. The U.S. has mostly private radio and television
broadcasting; the U.K. for a long time had only public. The U.S. had
private monopoly phone systems; European countries had government
phone systems.

Or in other words, you ought to be
be able to provide for yourself lots of modern examples of societies
that differed in how libertarian they were in one dimension or
another.

As to my "nostalgic view of
history," I believe that all of my historical articles are available
on my web page. Perhaps you could point out the "nostalgic"
bits.

As I said before, we
libertarian-skeptics are waiting for some brave libertarians to put
their money where their mouth is and start creating a small
libertarian community. ... Then if that works, they could buy (and
subdivide) a large ranch (or small island) that is distant from
government tentacles and begin a community of libertarians living in
peace and harmony with markets and property rights, but no local
government and no local taxes.

There have been a number of
attempts along those lines. The problem is that existing governments
are very reluctant to sell property along with sovereignty--and if
they do, it is difficult to prevent them from reneging on the deal.
Hence nudging existing societies towards being more libertarian
seems, so far, a more promising approach.

People like the unabomber or
Timothy McVeigh also espouse similar rhetoric as their philosophical
underpinning.

I can't speak to McVeigh, since I
don't think I have read anything he wrote, but the Unabomber's
rhetoric was anti-technology, not libertarian.

Much popular libertarian rhetoric
is a subtle revolutionary call to arms.

Much liberal rhetoric is, in the
same sense, a subtle justification for poor people mugging rich
people. In both cases, the fact that the rhetoric can be used that
way tells us very little about whether the underlying arguments are
true or false.